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‘Deleted’ families: What went wrong with Trump’s family-separation effort I From Evening Edition I The Washington Post

‘Deleted’ families: What went wrong with Trump’s family-separation effort

When
a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunify migrant
families separated at the border, the government’s cleanup crews faced
an immediate problem.

They weren’t sure who the families were, let alone what to call them.

Customs
and Border Protection databases had categories for “family units,” and
“unaccompanied alien children” who arrive without parents. They did not
have a distinct classification for more than 2,600 children who had been
stripped away from their families and placed in government shelters.

So agents came up with a new term: “deleted family units.”

But
when they sent that information to the refugee office at the Department
of Health and Human Services, which was told to facilitate the
reunifications, the office’s database did not have a column for families
with that designation.

The crucial tool for
fixing the problem was crippled. Case workers and government health
officials had to sift by hand through the files of all the nearly 12,000
migrant children in HHS custody to figure out which ones had arrived
with parents, where the adults were jailed and how to put the families
back together.

Compounding failures to record,
classify and keep track of migrant parents and children pulled apart by
President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border crackdown were at the core of
what is now widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles of his
presidency. The rapid implementation and sudden reversal of the policy
whiplashed multiple federal agencies, forcing the activation of an HHS command center ordinarily used to handle hurricanes and other catastrophes.

After
his 30-day deadline to reunite the “deleted” families passed Thursday,
U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw lambasted the government for its lack
of preparation and coordination.

“There were
three agencies, and each was like its own stovepipe. Each had its own
boss, and they did not communicate,” Sabraw said Friday at a court
hearing in San Diego. “What was lost in the process was the family. The
parents didn’t know where the children were, and the children didn’t
know where the parents were. And the government didn’t know either.”

This
account of the separation plan’s implementation and sudden demise is
based on court records as well as interviews with more than 20 current
and former government officials, advocates and contractors, many of whom
spoke on the condition of anonymity to give candid views and diagnose
mistakes.

Trump officials have insisted that
they were not doing anything extraordinary and were simply upholding the
law. The administration saw the separations as a powerful tool to deter
illegal border crossings and did not anticipate the raw emotional
backlash from separating thousands of families to prosecute the parents
for crossing the border illegally.

Most of
those parents were charged with misdemeanors and taken to federal
courthouses for mass trials, where they were sentenced to time served.
By then, their children were already in government shelters. The
government did not view the families as a discrete group or devise a
special plan to reunite them, until Sabraw ordered that it be done.

Ariel
Romero and his son Jose, 7, of Honduras, cry outside of the
Loretto-Nazareth Migrant Shelter in El Paso, Tex. (Ivan Pierre
Aguirre/For The Washington Post)

One
result was that more than 400 parents were deported without their
children. Many other parents say they went weeks without being able to
speak to their sons and daughters and, in dozens of cases, signed forms
waiving their rights to reclaim their children without understanding
what those forms said.

Scrambling to meet the
judge’s reunification deadline, government chaperons transported
children from shelters scattered across the country to immigration jails
near the border where they’d been severed from their parents weeks or
months before.

One attorney said Friday that 10
days had passed since her client was told she would be reunited with
her 6-year-old daughter. She remained in detention in Texas, and neither
she nor a social worker for her daughter, waiting in a New York
shelter, could get an explanation. “She watched all the other mothers go
out of her dorm. There is only her and one other left,” said the
attorney, Eileen Blessinger.

In court filings
Thursday, the government said it had reunited more than 1,800 children
with their parents or other guardians. But 711 children would remain
separated for now, because their parents had been deported, had criminal
records or otherwise had not been cleared to regain custody.

In
the end, Trump’s decision to stop separating families, followed by
Sabraw’s reunification order, has largely brought a return to the status
quo at the border, with hundreds of adults released from custody to
await immigration hearings while living with their children in the
United States.

“If you’re really, really
pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of
people. And if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart,” Trump
griped before his June 20 executive order, calling it “a tough dilemma.”

Senior
administration officials said they made efforts to note which families
had been broken up and that they believed the HHS system already in
place would have allowed parents to recover their children and leave the
country together by agreeing to voluntary deportation.

Children
along their parents and others sit in the Senate Hart Building, July
26, in Washington, D.C., n the day of the court-imposed deadline for the
Trump administration to return separated migrant childre to their
families. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

“There was always an intent for reunification to occur. It wasn’t meant to be a permanent condition,” one official said.

Sabraw, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, said even a short-term split was unacceptable.

“It
is the act of separation from a parent, particularly with young
children, that matters,” he told the government in court proceedings.

'A huge blowback'

When
illegal crossings along the Mexico border jumped this spring to their
highest levels since Trump took office, the president fumed, telling
aides, “This can’t happen on my watch.” He singled out Department of
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for blame.

Family
units consisting of at least one parent and one child were a growing
share of those coming across, typically to turn themselves in and claim
asylum, citing drug violence and gang threats in Central America. Border
Patrol officials called them “non-impactables,” meaning that the adults
knew that arriving with children would probably result in them being
released from detention to await immigration hearings that could be
months or years away.

Agents in the field had
long clamored for a way to deter those border crossers, believing that
some are smugglers and that allowing them to go unpunished invites more
lawbreaking. By this spring, according to DHS, a quarter of all illegal
border crossers were family groups.

“We truly
felt this was something we had to do,” a senior DHS official said.
“Enforcing the law for the right reasons is not a bad decision.”

Suddenly, an idea considered too extreme by the Obama administration was back in play, pushed by powerful supporters, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller, and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly.

But there were also top officials at DHS and other agencies who warned it could go disastrously wrong.

“Some
of us didn’t think it would be good policy. Not because it wouldn’t be
effective, but because it doesn’t reflect American values, and because
it would bring a huge blowback,” said James Nealon, a former DHS
international policy adviser who resigned in February.

A
woman, identified only as Maria, reaches for her son Franco,4, as they
are reunited at the El Paso International Airport on July 26 in El Paso.
(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The
government previously had separated parents on a more limited basis,
such as when trafficking was suspected or the relationship to the child
was in doubt.

Last year, with no public
announcement, the administration piloted a mass-separation system in the
El Paso area. When illegal crossings jumped this spring, Trump signed
off on a blanket policy for the whole border.

“If
you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child
will be separated from you as required by law,” Sessions said in a May 7 speech in Arizona. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”

One
senior Border Patrol official said agents were quietly directed not to
refer parents of children under 5 for criminal prosecution. But 27
toddlers and preschoolers were separated between the start of
“zero-tolerance” on May 5 and Trump’s executive order ending separations
on June 20. Dozens more had been taken from their parents in previous
weeks.

As
the system ramped up, thousands of children were funneled into shelters
overseen by HHS, so many that the agency had to set up a tent
camp outside El Paso and plan for additional ones on military bases.

“I
think CBP and ICE would have preferred a plan that was more
incremental, starting in certain locations, or with specific groups,”
said Stewart Verdery, assistant homeland security secretary under Bush,
referring to Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. “Something that could be done in a ratcheted way, so you
could know exactly where people were physically and with respect to
litigation status.”

On June 28, two days
after Sabraw’s reunification order, DHS officials held a conference call
for members of its Homeland Security Advisory Council, a group of
security experts and former officials who provide recommendations and
counsel to the secretary. One member, David A. Martin, said officials
had few answers when dismayed members asked how they planned to bring
families back together: “They were saying, “Well, we’re working on
it.’ ” Two weeks later, he and three other members quit in disgust.

In
his resignation letter, Martin said the separations were “executed with
astounding casualness about precise tracking of family relationships —
as though eventual reunification was deemed unlikely or at least
unimportant.”

Another member who quit,
Elizabeth Holtzman, said the failure to create records to track parents
and children demonstrated “utter depravity.”

“This is child kidnapping, plain and simple,” she wrote in her resignation letter, urging Nielsen to quit.

Top officials
believed any controversy generated by the family separations could be
parlayed into leverage for negotiations with Democrats over the
Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and border wall
funding, according to current and former DHS officials involved in
planning the policy.

Instead the firestorm has
“poisoned the well,” leaving the chances of congressional action even
more remote, said Verdery, who now runs a lobbying firm. “If you’re a
Democrat or a moderate, and a proposal is pigeonholed as DHS ‘breaking
up families,’ it’s going to be a nonstarter.”

Broken systems

Well
before Trump took office, people inside and outside HHS’s Office of
Refugee Resettlement recognized that the custom-built database used
since 2014 to track the migrant children in its custody was clunky and
flawed.

The Unaccompanied Children
Portal crashed often, according to several people with access to it. And
because it sometimes failed to save information, caseworkers were
trained to copy whatever they were trying to enter about a child into a
separate Word document.

Most serious, the
portal was not built in a way that allowed ORR to add data categories or
quickly sort the information it contains, according to three people
familiar with it. If HHS staff wanted to compile specific information,
such as a roster of all the pregnant teenagers at shelters, “It would be
months and months,” said a former department official.

Because
the system was not designed with an expectation that ORR would need to
find the detained parents of its children, the portal did not include a
column to type in information about parents’ identity, location or file
number.

A
2015 Government Accountability Office report concluded that “the
interagency process to refer and transfer [unaccompanied children] from
DHS to HHS is inefficient and vulnerable to errors because it relies on
e-mails and manual data entry, and documented standard procedures,
including defined roles and responsibilities, do not exist.”

By
2016, the former official said, then-HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews
Burwell “was frustrated, because, a lot of times we just had to say, ‘We
can’t get this data,’ or ‘We can get it, but it will take a couple of
weeks.’ ”

The department hired a government
contractor who made recommendations for upgrading the system and adding
more staff. A few improvements were made, but it was near the end of the
Obama administration, and the old guard ran out of time. “We left a
blueprint for the new administration to pick up,” the former official
said. “To my knowledge, nothing happened.”

Just
before Trump was sworn in, a trio of immigrant advocacy groups issued a
report lamenting what it said was a slow increase in families being
separated at the border. It warned that “government agencies have little
policy guidance on family unity and separation, and no consistent or
comprehensive mechanisms to document family status or trace family
members.”

After the new administration took
over, “We were begging them to start counting those numbers” of
separated children, said Michelle Brane, director of the Women’s Refugee
Commission’s migrant rights and justice program, which was one of the
groups that authored the report. “They insisted they don’t have a way to
do that.”

An HHS spokesman said a “data
element” was added to the system about two weeks ago to make clear
whether a child was separated from a parent or guardian while being
apprehended. The system now had the capacity to generate reports, as
well as to upload Word documents and spreadsheets, the spokesman said.

Flip-flopped standards

HHS
officials said they participated in White House calls and meetings
after “zero tolerance” was announced. But they did not address repeated
questions about whether the department was involved in planning the
policy.

The department’s refu­gee office was
overwhelmed with the number of children in its custody once the mass
separations began. And the files arriving from the Border Patrol were a
mess.

In some cases, Border Patrol agents had
handwritten parents’ names and alien numbers in children’s files that
were sent on to ORR. But it was hit or miss, according to several
children’s advocates familiar with the records. One HHS official said
that files he reviewed typically contained parents’ names but did not
say where they could be located.

The underlying
problem, though, was that the problem-ridden database “was not set up
to reunite children [with] parents from whom they’d been separated,”
said Robert Carey, who was director of ORR for the final two years of
the Obama era.

As one senior DHS official put it: “We had a system that was designed to flow one way.”

Four days before
Sabraw’s reunification order, HHS Secretary Alex Azar pulled
responsibility for returning children to their parents away from ORR and
placed it in the hands of emergency responders.

Today,
Justice Department officials insist “zero tolerance” remains in force.
The agency “continues to prosecute, to the extent practicable, all cases
referred to them for prosecution,” said spokesman Devin O’Malley.

Though
illegal crossings typically decline during summer, DHS officials point
to a drop in arrests along the border last month as proof the family
separation system was working before the president halted it.

“Many
of the facts around the enforcement efforts were lost in the media and
congressional hysteria, misreporting, dishonest assertions, and outright
lies about the efforts of the administration,” one senior
administration official vented. “The facts and rule of law lost out to
emotional claims.”

Border Patrol officials
privately predict that smugglers will be emboldened by flip-flopping
enforcement standards, and say they are bracing for the number of
crossings to rise. With families once more largely exempted, agents have
grudgingly reverted to the same “catch and release” system Trump
promised to end.

“We missed out on an
opportunity to educate the public about the reality of the border,” said
one Border Patrol official who shared criticism of the White House on
the condition of anonymity. “You have to think everything through before
you move on something like this, and when the pushback hits, you have
to weather the storm.”

The American Civil
Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit that led to Sabraw’s order,
said it could take months to track down hundreds of deported parents and
make arrangements to return their children. Some parents may be hard to
reach or hiding from the very threats that prompted them to flee in the
first place.

In the meantime, the government
will attempt to place their children with vetted guardians. Otherwise,
they will remain in shelters.

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